Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, is leading an inquiry into JPMorgan losses on credit derivatives bets associated with the trader known as the London Whale. Bloomberg, citing unnamed sources, says that the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on investigations, which Senator Levin chairs, is seeking testimony from employees in the bank’s chief investment office. Read More
And Bruno Iksil, a.k.a. the London Whale, a.k.a. Voldemort, is lawyering up, and in comprehensive fashion: According to Reuters, Mr. Iksil has hired attorneys in France, New York and Washington D.C. Ina Drew, Achilles Macris, Javier Martin-Artajo, Peter Weiland or Irvin Goldman—all former employees of JPMorgan’s chief investment office—have also retained legal representation. Well, if Read More
Whither Europe: Greece’s leading pro-bailout party—conservative New Democracy, which won Sunday’s elections, and socialist Pasok—are still negotiating to form a coalition to govern the teetering nation. Assuming a deal gets done, the first task will be to convince Europe to rewrite the Greek rescue agreement to provide more time—and financing—to meet austerity goals. Read More
John Coates ran a derivatives desk at Deutsche Bank until he got more interested in traders than trading. During the tech bubbled he’d noticed traders seemed biologically transformed by the go-go market. In 2005, he took saliva swabs from 250 bankers, and discovered that traders made more money on mornings when their levels were high, Read More
Naive! Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman has no sympathy for Facebook investors who expected to profit from a first-day spike in share prices. “People who thought they were buying this stock so they could get an enormous pop were both naive and ordered under the wrong pretenses,” Mr. Gorman said yesterday in an interview with CNBC. To which he might have added: “Didn’t they read Devitt’s research?” Mr. Gorman, of course, had this to say in January to investment bankers upset over Morgan Stanley pay cuts: “You’re naive, read the newspaper.“ Read More
Losses mount: Tack on another $1 billion to the $2 billion-plus in trading losses JPMorgan disclosed a week ago today, says Dealbook, as hedge funds and other investors—knowing that Jamie Dimon’s firm is under pressure to sell out from under the losing bet—continue to prey on the firm’s huge, illiquid position.
Before Bruno Iksil Read More
The Jamie Dimon utterance from last night’s mea culpa that stuck with us today had to do with hindsight—not when he said that looking back, the hedging strategy that resulted in a $2 billion loss was “flawed, complex, poorly reviewed, poorly executed and poorly monitored”—but rather this: “Hindsight is—even in hindsight, it’s not 20/20.”
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